Why does my local council prefer supported living to residential care?

The major turning point in policy was probably the Winterbourne View scandal in 2011. This was a BBC Panorama investigation into abuse in a hospital near Bristol. What it filmed was viscerally shocking, and it led to a radical change in living environments for adults with learning disabilities.

Major policy changes followed: Transforming Care (2012), the Care Act (2014), and the Building the Right Support Action Plan (2022), and several others. Each moved things further towards a model of independent living.

So the first reason councils tend to prefer supported living is that they are delivering national policy, locally.

The second reason is money. Because residential care and supported living are funded differently, it costs the council less per person to house someone in supported living than in residential care. The council pays the full costs of a person in residential care, both the care and the ‘hotel’ costs, but pays only for the care element in supported living. There, the rent is covered by Housing Benefit, funded by central government rather than from the council’s own adult social care budget.

So supported living takes up less of a council’s already constrained budget.

It is worth adding why supported living is the preferred model. Its whole rationale is choice and control, giving a person as much say as possible over their own home, their day, and the support they receive.